Slashdot Mirror

OK boys and girls, lets learn a new tern today.... can we say Class Action Lawsuit? If all the companies are together being harassed by AOL/Netscape/Time Warner/ and how many other companies have merged into it by the time I post this, then why not stand your ground and fight together. The enemy of my enemy is my friend! As for me, I have never used the GAIM interface, but only because I didn't know it existed. I will be downloading it tonight if I find it is not already on my machine. I am a great defender of the Free Source project, and I hate to see one or a group of them be pushed around by big business. I will be more than glad to donate to this cause. Please let me know what I can do to help!! email me with suggestions/comments/flames steddyj@hotmail.com

not true. Since sending email is effectively free, many spammers use the Rumplestiltskin Attack to guess email addresses. If your Hotmail email is something common like joe@hotmail.com, you will probably get more spam than mr_gerbik_23423487@hotmail.com.

not true. Since sending email is effectively free, many spammers use the Rumplestiltskin Attack to guess email addresses. If your Hotmail email is something common like joe@hotmail.com, you will probably get more spam than mr_gerbik_23423487@hotmail.com.

Can you imagine what this technology would do to a search engine like Google? It's all a conspiracy. It's always a conspiracy. Is there anywhere to go to get away from all this?

(end sarcasm. And I'd just like to say- holy shit!! Look what you can do when you win the browser war. Who wants to bet that the way they'll appease CNet and the like is by _selling_ 'smart link' access to common english words? Talk about seizing a choke hold on communication and mindspace. This is so far out of line it makes my head spin. It potentially plays merry hell with _my_ trademarks and IP.)

(end sarcasm. And I'd just like to say- holy shit!! Look what you can do when you win the browser war. Who wants to bet that the way they'll appease CNet and the like is by _selling_ 'smart link' access to common english words? Talk about seizing a choke hold on communication and mindspace. This is so far out of line it makes my head spin. It potentially plays merry hell with _my_ trademarks and IP.)

• Distributed.Net, OGR project: Our current combined OGR network speed is 182.49 Giga-nodes per second
• UD Cancer Research Project: 609,178 devices, 104,791,203 hours total CPU time
• Seti@home: 3044035 users, 673412.833 years of computer time

• restricted access to the communication medium
• the need to filter out the relevant communication from a huge mass of communications taking place at the same time."

Then! They introduced DS9 to us. What were they thinking? I just wasn't sure. What am I gonna do, I had to give it a looksee, it is part of the universe after all. Well, again to my shagrin, it certainly did have it's redeming qualities. They're not all equally strong, mind you, all these different branches of a series they came up with, but it seems as though, the stronger carry the weak while the weak supply many unexpected yet necessary intricacies(whew!) on which to feast your imagination. As well as I think they help to fill out a universe and give it reality.

Voyager... In spite of the fact that it was geared towards a style of sci-fi and space exploration/adventure which is more to my heart's content, whilst pining aboard DS9, I seemed to have found myself more resistant toward even the possibility of allowing myself to like yet another attempt at either perpetuating, salvaging or otherwise trying to manipulate the time-honored memory of a series that became a ground breaking, growth inspiring media in which to set free an otherwise culture/civilization and society shackled spirit we have all been oppressed amongst! However, yet again Voyager did prove to have what it takes to come into it's own and to take it's place there amongst the pantheon of successful Roddenbury(sp?)-inspired Star Trek series.

So... here are we are, the ragg'd'est bunch of 'please just give us yet another series, so we have something to feed our Star Trek addictions with!' (after all, we all do know, this is exactly what Roddenberry intended the entire time. "yes, yes, I'll just hook them with the first series, then I'll really start to blow their minds... sheep'... cattle'... the herd'... I know they'll do anything, once I have them. They're all so weak minded, they actually think that it's the addition of each new series and the possible positives and/or negatives it may carry with it that will hook them or drive them away, they think that's the hook... I'll tell me what, I think it's My mind that's going to be blown when they realize that the quintessential plan all along has been 'there shall be no end to the series... whatsoever.'") (... I think?)... so as I was saying before I was most rudely interupted by Gene... yes, there's going to be another series, and another after that, and who knows? Let's take the long shot, another after that! 'And you know what, we're all going to find things with each new series that we love, like, can stand, dislike and utterly abhor(sp?) (not that cows or their genetalia have anything to do with this) as the series grows and grows, our universe flows and flows, we enjoy it while it grows while it guides us in our growth. After all, there is something to be learned, liked, and loved in everything. This is all I have to say, aren't you relieved.

Slainte Mhath!, Dobhairsean Mac a' Bhalldruidh nan Tuatha de Mac a' Phearsain nan Tuatha de An'Chattan.
A'Thuatha Gu Bradh!

And very relieved, this is Joshua typing, cheers. ;)

Terradot

(spam it to me me at "test2201@hotmail.com", the default hotmail filters move 66 % to bulk(=spam) mail. > 10 msd per day).

But it seems spammers have worked arround this by linesniffing. If your account gets older more and more leaks occur. I wonder how people on highly visible web sites manage. Is there any GOOD antispam software that can handle multiple pop3 accounts?

If there is a return addres i do send them a reply, of coarse with a fake email adress. They take my time --> i take time from them. I try to prevent accessing web sites since they might get paid for every hit. And hey, i already know where to find porn on the internet.

mborland writes:
[nice things about Blogger, then]
I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason. The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.

Note that this Trellix deal, which is the kind of thing they'd been pursuing last year without success, marks a significant turn for the better. Licensing fees from Trellix will underwrite Blogger's main service, as well as Pyra's development efforts. Pyra has already hired a second employee again.

Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime

Major is debatable. There have been a couple of hours-long outages, to be sure, but that happens even with major, well-funded services.

because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing.

The only "errors" I've encoutnered -- apart from some difficulties with FTP posts way back in 1999, when they were still tweaking the service -- is the log file overflow problem. Evan finally fixed that on all servers last week.

Well, there is an issue with archive indexes. That's still a sore point with some users. But it's not a deal-breaker for most.

And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.

Note that the SQL server is behind a firewall, and only communicates with the Java Pyra client. There's a security issue there, to be sure, but it's handled here as well as at any e-commerce site. Besides, if you're concerned, you can always put your weblog up on a free service with its own password, or set up (as I can) a password with access only for Blogger. Just as with any security problem, this can be managed.

And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Did you READ the news release?

Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.

It's April, not February. You're reacting to the last bad news, not the recent good news. Catch up.

Even so, in the end, it's just a simple publishing service. I love using it, and it would be a chore to change over (one reason I haven't), but it wouldn't kill me if it went away.
----
lake effect weblog

If you put it in bold it can echo up to ten posts deep!

(I hate the threats too)

I've been in the technology PR industry for about five years, having moved from the IT industry. Here are my thoughts...

There are no hard-fast rules to getting good PR. If you are a start-up company, I highly recommend either 1) getting a mid-to-senior practicioner in-house, or 2) hiring an independant consultant. If the company starts to scale in terms of revenue, customer, headcount, funding, and so on, then it makes sense to retain an agency in order to hammer out a solid strategy and position the startup to play in the bigger leagues.

The dot-com boom brought in a lot of PR shysters, kibbitzers, and dilletantes. I would surmise that the person who posted this "Ask Slashdot" may have been taken by one of them. There was a point when such a dilletante could strip naked, tattoo "I do PR" on his/her ass, run up-and-down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park (the famous VC shopping mall), and get three clients or so.

In today's environment, you can pretty much take your pick of agencies. (I will refrain from pitching my own firm here, but I will say that we're mid-sized, independent, and very good at what we do.)

As the current downturn runs its course, it acts like a crucible on the high-tech PR industry: all of the crap and impurities are being burned away and, within the year, the best product will remain.

PR isn't rocket science but, done poorly, it's disastrous. What trips people up often isn't PR strategies/tactics, but learning about the client's technology. Coming from an IT background, that hasn't been a problem for me. You'd be surprised how many people have gotten into high-tech PR who lack the technical smarts that God gave the pygmy marmoset.

As to resources, InternetPRguide.com is often helpful. People can rant back to me here or at maximum_entropy@hotmail.com.

Does this remind anyone else (other than me) of the oft-failed concept of the network computer? This seems to come up every few years -- it's back to the future time, as companies try to restore the days of dumb terminals and mainframes. Sure, the processing is now distributed, but the fundamental problem remains: People simply aren't comfortable with having their software residing on another machine.

I've been an avid fan of Ultima games for almost a decade, and ever since I started playing them, I've wanted to be making them... And just as I break out into the software industry & gain the qualifications to accomplish this little dream of mine, Origin collapses & Richard Garriot leaves.

How do I get on board? Could they use an extra pair of (cheap if need be)hands? Where's the dotted line? Does anybody have the hook up? I can't find anything formal on the project, or the company that I assume it will blossom into shortly?

Sacrificial Email:shroo88@hotmail.com

Any chance this is related to the Rife device? I'm interested in discussing this, email me if you'd like to talk about it.

blackicefiero@hotmail.com

As I read it, you don't lose copyright on material sent though Passport-related sites, but The Borg gets copyright (and other things) on it as well.

Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913

by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".

THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY

Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.

In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.

Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".

And that brings us to the morality of governance.

The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.

The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)

These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.

WARRIOR INSURANCE

The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.

Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".

Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.

Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.

Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.


THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

> Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok

Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:

The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.

Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.

Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.

In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.

With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.

But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:

How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?

The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:

Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.

By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.

The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.

Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.

CONCLUSION

As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.

Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.

The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.

The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.

References

(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.

(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html

(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.ht m

An excerpt:

"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."

(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.

(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.

(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.

(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.

In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.

If you like, contact me at geekxx@hotmail.com. I'd be really interested in talking to your friend about this. Maybe we could help each other out. My revenue predictions indicate you should be able to do quite well running one of these.

-Vercingetorix

from article : [Fact] AOL Time Warner Inc. CEO Gerald Levin recently stated that the basic cost of providing high-speed cable services was about $12 a month, so the company could tap into a potent new revenue stream by selling wholesale access to independent ISPs like EarthLink, which has agreed to pay a wholesale rate of $24 to $27 per subscriber per month.
[Fact] Independent ISP owners and operators are willing to pay fair-market rates. The problem is that access has not been available at "any" rate. Only AOL Time Warner's extortionate rates have been announced to date.

So lets snap together some DNS', routers and some basic security and let it rip sometime this year right? I mean, to quote Winston Zedmore, "We have the Tools, we have the TALENT!" do we not?

interested parties can email me.

Interested parties, e-mail me at merlin_jim@hotmail.com... I'm looking for encoders AND decoders here...

"what do you *mean*, 'out of print' you sniveling twinkee-eating cockroach?", i queried the weird-harold lookalike.

i thought i was going to be sick. not for my lack of reading material but for some of the finest toon material ever to grace pulp, for a lost generation thinking that calvin had no peer. around the corner to the used bookstore. SEVEN OF NINE tomes for the obscenely low price of $35. i'm not sure what the cashier made of my wide-eyed dollar-waiving self.

this has brought me to one, inescapable conclusion. we must find berke, strap him to a suitable table and make him bring back the crew.

look, i'm completely cool with civility, but there comes a time when asking nice just isn't going to cut it. it's also clear that mr. breathed isn't exactly beyond using this tactic himself (see "toons for our times", pg. 59). no, i'm serious. i'm starting a website and an email campaign to petition the man to return to his sanity. he can ignore us at his own peril.

that having been said, some of his original strips are for sale - he has apparently given two years worth of strips to his stepmom and his full blessing to sell them. they can be found at:

http://www.neosoft.com/~bloom/avail1.htm

you need to have the original books to determine which are which, but ...who is going to buy one of these who doesn't have the books?! it isn't very clear, but the cheapo ones are $250 (they're in red), the regular ones are $400 and the color sunday strips are $900. the page also isn't clear on who you need to contact - carolynbreathed@hotmail.com. she seems like a very nice woman, but she does reply in ALL CAPS. be nice to her.

if any of you came through halfway and don't really know the whole gang, an exhaustive rundown can be found at http://www.droops.cybermail.net/bchistory/bchist19 81.html, covering the first appearance of limekiller to the ultimate, last toon.

finally, for anyone who doubts that illiad (respects || rips off) bloom county, please see this userfriendly.org toon..

not for my sake, but please mod the everyloving hell out of this post. i'd really like to see some of his toons get into the hands of fans.

My .02,

I'm not kidding on this one. I swear.

I've been thinking about this over the past few weeks and I think using PHP & MySQL (and perhaps a little Java) you could hammer out an interesting (hopefully entertaining) structure for MUD/MUSH-like multiplayer text adventures.

The idea of bringing MUDs into the 20th century intrigues me - kinda like everquest.

If this doesn't sound dumber than rocks, let me know.

There are exits to the north, west and south.

There really is no way to keep knowledge of tacnuke construction and the like a secret. Look at what the credit card companies tried to do with magstrip encoding; now any determined young post-h4x0[Z kid can encode their very own Visa, and the tech to make the physical card has been out since the 80s.

Probably, the only effective way of keeping these sort of things under control is to either restrict the materials or strike somewhere else entirely, such as with heavier penalties for child porn and the like. Just a suggestion, given the fact that the current system fails by your definition of success.

Yahoo is not the Internet. Regardless of whether it is acquired, there will always be "unwalled gardens" on the Internet. Granted, an acquisition of Yahoo would be damaging to the free Internet community, but it would not cripple it. For a search engine, people would have Google, for messaging, AIM (yeah, not the best example), ICQ, etc. For e-mail, there are all sorts of providers, such as MyRealBox and a certain "secure" e-mail service that I will not name. News is available everywhere. Stock quotes can be had at the NASDAQ site. I'd go on, but Yahoo has grown to provide everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink.

My point is that there is nothing that Yahoo has that isn't also available elsewhere for free. The free Internet idea would not be destroyed if Yahoo was acquired.

Now, on the bad side, there's the man who leads up our School's technology divison, which we all lovingly refer to as "Mr. Dick". This is the guy that told one of my friends that Linux was based on Windows NT. Our school is set up so that all a student can do on the network is browse the internet. That's IT. So, the HS T.A.G. program decided to put down some of our funds from a grant we had gotten to buy a Computer that we could actually do things that we were interested in. (Programming, Video Editing, Music Creation, etc.) We wanted to do all the setup ourselfs, so that it wouldn't be set up like the other "drone" computers in the school, so that we could actually use it for what it was intended for. We come into class the next day, and, lo and behold, he's sitting there with some guy from R&D (A company which is contracted by the school for tech work...they pretty much do his job for him) he's setting it up just like all the other computers. So, we jump the BIOS, format and do a dual boot w/ Linux and Windows 2000. He takes it, reformats. We do the same. He does the same. And so on. This cycle is still going to this day.

Another wonderful tale of Dicky's wonderous deeds is when some stupid script kiddie in our school had a disk w/ a keystroke recorder, and left it in the library. The librarian asked him if it was his, and he said it was. So, he got pulled down to Dickmeister's office, and he tried to interrogate him w/ the whole "I can have you arrested for this!" thing. He lied and said he got it from some other kid (Who I don't really like in the first place) who helped us set up some stuff on the T.A.G. Computer. So, Mr. Dick uses this as an excuse to try to take said computer out of the T.A.G. room because it might be "evidence". That's how he found out that we formatted, etc. So, he threatened this kid w/ Arrest n' whatknot, and he made up all kinds of laws he could get him on....until he got a lawyer. He stopped bothering him after that. It was still 2 more months after that before we got the computer back. They also tried to tell us that the grant we got specifically for the T.A.G. program were not T.A.G. funds, and the principal said that "We put all the grant money the school gets into a pot, and then we divide it up to the different programs at the school."

I hate my school.

I'll stop ranting for today. I've got a couple dozen more stories that I could tell, but, I'm getting all pissed off again from remembering this.

~~plungerhead

Its not very difficult to get free email addresses... Microsoft, Netscape, and many others, will give you a plethora of email address to use if you're afraid of getting your "real" email full of canned meat.

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The problem with e-mail is the ability it gives to send many millions of e-mails to lots of people.

That's not a problem with email (note the lack of the hyphen--Don Knuth has a good linguistic analysis of why email is hyphenless somewhere on his site), but with people abusing email. It's pretty much like saying, "the problem with cars is the ability it gives people to drink and drive".

I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family know about it.

Wow. You mean all of us here at Slashdot are trusted members of your family? Really? Free hint: just by having a address for us Slashdotters to submit to, you undercut the very point you're trying to make.

My own email address, posted at the top of this message, is a spambouncer. It checks email and forwards them on to my real email account, where I can decide if I want to share my email addy with you or not.

So far, I've managed to stay (mostly) spam-free by a combination of judicious filtering and using proxy addresses.

Other people (like this guy) manage to do just fine, too, to the point where he has his Palm VII set up to receive wireless email from complete strangers, just because he thinks it's cool.

(Bruce, if you're reading this: you rock. Way to be accessible to the community. I would email this to you directly, but I don't want to spam you.)

So in other words, KTB, your "I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family" argument only holds water for you. There are lots of other people--ESR, BP, RMS, Linus, just to name a few--who manage to get by just fine, even though they get reams more email than you do.

The lack of trustworthyness [sic] and the dilution of feeling that is a result of mass e-mailing does not lend itself to mass communication, I have found.

If you're finding this, you're looking in the wrong places. Some mailing lists, such as the Continuing Time and Millennium's End lists which I'm on, are actual communities. If you think mass email is "remote", then how do you account for the vibrant BBS communities of old?

How can you beat the handwritten letter for the personal touch?

Try investing a little of yourself in your emails. Believe it or not, it really does work.

I know that this messageboard is a haven for "script kids" and other hacking types, so I'm sure one of you knows the answer. I would like to integrate knowlegde of such hacker practices into our MCSE+Internet certification, but the program's technical director is stumped. Any clues?


See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.

The mgetty and vgetty programs appear to be very weak and buggy plus they don't work with every modem.

I need the Voicemail and Fax abilities, the BBS would be a bonus. Any ideas? E-mail them to cable4096@hotmail.com

• Mailing address - Your local post office (US link, consult your directory if not in US)
• Phone Number - UReach, OneBox, eFax
• E-Mail address - Yahoo!, HotMail, Several Others

Not very hard at all, especially since you'll give false information to the latter two groups in order to sign up, and the first one can't sell your info anyway.

---

Character education in school? Faith-based leadership programs? AAAUUGHH!!! If the US officially hates Iran so much, then why are we allowing a leader to turn us _into_ Iran?

D*mn, and I thought the Natural Law party was full of anti-abortion old-testamenters, sheesh...

Listen, I'm not on the straight and narrow like our favorite coke-snorting uncle here, but I know a threat to freedom when I see it...I'm starting a Dark Hearts button campaign, just to tell that SOB where he can stick his character education!

anyway, if you want some little buttons with black hearts printed on them (and possibly a little more rational screed on my whole position), please send your snailmail address here and I'll send five buttons anywhere you want. Gah! Ohako

I'm getting really tired of hearing that the Internet is the only place we as a whole can 'reveal' ourselves as geeks. I say that we need to take the force of this community, here, to the local level, to the battleground of the high school.

I've printed up a whole mess of little buttons with black hearts on them (props to one GW Bush for the idea), and I want to get them out to as many of _us_ as possible.

You mail your snailmail address here, and I'll mail you five buttons for free. You just have to wear them!

Keith Page

During the second presidential debate Governer Bush proclaimed that 'a child could turn to the Internet and have their heart turn dark'. During the third debate Gore spoke of the 'battle' between popular culture and parenting, and of the need for federal regulation to help parents 'win'.

Many people think I am a sarcastic asshole. I do not pay attention to warning labels on music. I wept not only for the victims of the massacre at Columbine, but also for the persecution that followed, and the resulting paranoia of people like the Trenchcoat Mafia. I enjoy reading the Onion. I am not one of 'the right people', whoever they are. I feel that my way of life is threatened. I feel that Al Gore wants to ban MAD Magazine. I am scared when Bush claims 'there should be limits to freedom' in response to a website parody tilted against him.

I want these politicians to know that I am not a grumkin hiding in a sewer or a dark alley, ready to pop out and sing some Tom Lehrer songs to innocent, impressionable youths (I don't like sewers that much). I am not the enemy, and I am not an insurance liability. _We_ are good people, and _we_ will not be silenced or legislated against, or used as a debating "straw man" to symbolize something that is wrong with America. In fact, I strongly believe that America without people like us would be a bland and boring place.

I've printed up a whole bunch of little buttons with dark hearts on them, a la pink triangle. If you agree with my views, or even if you think I'm a total whiner who should move to Canada anyhow, I would be honored to have you wear a Dark Heart button.

drop me a line at this address with your snailmail address and I'll send you some buttons.

Sincerely,
Keith Page

Requirements aren't met: SSH access

YM SSL. SSH accounts are shell accounts; only SourceForge gives those out anymore.

and I assume POP that you don't have to pay for

The article said "POP over SSL or better." AFAIK, Hotmail can be configured as HTTP over SSL.

I would be interested in hearing what steps you have taken to communicate the problem with your ISP and the steps they have taken to fix the problem.

Anyways, to answer your question, I have no problems with Yahoo! Mail and HoTMaiL but then again, the later violates your "secure" requirement as hotmail is notorious for accomodating even the simplest of security flaws.

If you haven't yet done so, It might be a good idea to talk to your ISP or pay them a visit to their offices or something. I wish you luck.

--

The included escape routes are: Swimming under the wall, climbing over chain-linked sections (not recommended), going through the sewers, and tunneling. A couple of people, who were very experienced at HL, have been able to fight their way across, so that is possible as well.

It was my first HL map, so don't send me any flames about it sucking. I got an A on the project anyway.

I have cleaned up the pic and sharpened it, but I don't have anyplace webwise to put it. Any takers?
Email notcarlos@hotmail.com

"I am so cool, you could keep a side of meat in me for a month

Hello, Mr. technos.

I am the head of the Slashdot chapter of 'Paranoid E-mail People Anonymous'. We can help you with your irresponsible use of such interjections as "crosswinds.spam.net," and "hotNOSPAMmail."

In the event that we need to contact you further, may we reach you at technos@crosswinds.net or too_much_punct@hotmail.com? After all, if you're going to sound all pompous, you might as well have the good graces to post your real e-mail address(es) for people like Mr. xtermz to use!

I also may be able to put you in touch with my counterpart at 'alt.recovery.e-mail.paranoia.' She'll probably be able to help you fully grasp the fact that very few people want to e-mail you. If they do want to e-mail you, it's best not to make them jump through hoops to avoid spam.

I hope you have found this helpful.

I don't care what Jon Katz has to say here, but I'm mad at Dubya for being a really mean guy toward my way of life. So. Enough kvetching. It's time for some _organized_ kvetching!

Today's Friday the 13th. I've just placed an order with this company here for 1000 buttons with black hearts on them that you can wear to show your solidarity for those of us in America whose hearts are dark with pride! Yeah, okay, that's pretty corny, I'm sorry. Maybe I'm reading too much into a two-second soundbite, I dunno.

Anyway, to get a stack of 20-50 buttons, just email here with your address, and as soon as I get mine, I'll send a pile onto you. Throwing a buck or two back to the return address to cover postage wouldn't be remiss either. Or heck, you could just print up a bunch of your own to hand around, that's entirely cool as well.

You know, I don't really have a mission statement for what _the cause_ is for why we should wear these things, I just figure that if gays have a pink triangle, and, um, those AIDS guys can have ribbons, that we should have something like that as well. I guess a black heart is as good as anything.

Sincerely,
Keith Page

I've always wondered why the doppler effect doesn't seem to effect phones on the aircraft (even though quality does suck, which is probably the doppler effect kicking in). So if the doppler is making the quality of an airline phone terrible, how will this effect data? If it's not doppler making the phones poor quality, what is being done to combat this effect? Any ideas/answers, E-Mail me.

The problem is all inside your head, he said to me
The answer is easy, if you see it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggly for privacy
there must be
50 ways to move your email

Get Yahoo, stu...
or Hotmail, Gail..
there's freeshell, Del,
Just listen to me
go get Hush, Gus,
we don't need to discuss much
and get PGP, Lee
and set yourself free

(I don't want to slashdot freeshell, but if you look hard enough, you can find them)

And upon further viewing, Hotmail doesn't even appear at all.

Is this just me, or is Microsoft complete non-standards compliant?

-----------
Looking for a laugh?

People feel that a genre is dead when one can't make any money off of it, I disagree. I feel that a genre is dead when nothing new comes out for it.

OT: I'm trying to modify a MUD engine for use with a Doom or Quake client. Actually I'll be using Doom or Quake (modified to have MUD like qualities) as a server and have a slim version for a client. If anybody could give me any pointers on doing this? Mail anything to Meenky.

Autospy of a Furby
Posted by michael on Friday August 18, @3:43PM
from the deja-vu dept.

Vladinator writes "Ever wonder what it's like to take apart a Furby? I don't, because I saw this on Slashdot two years ago, but I needed some karma so I submitted it anyway. Fawking trolls!" Those of who you started reading Slashdot this week may not have seen this page yet, so I'm re-running this classic for you three newbies.

( Read More... | 1 FIRST POST! )

Only 1 first post? I'd have expected atleast 15. :)